With sagely insight, Nu Zillun’s foremost Infallible Expert on Everything, prime minister John Key, opined that protesters who demonstrated in nationwide rallies across the South Pacific island nation against the impending Trans-Pacific Partnership on August 15, were “misinformed” and merely a “rent-a-crowd”. [Like many New Zealanders, John Key mashes his vowels with his consonants like they’re peas to be lost in mushed potatoes, so that New Zealand becomes Nu Zillun when spokun. – Ed.]

I’m going to climb the lab-engineered Capitalist State Tree and crawl out on its dying limb, Democracy, to explain why Key is one trillion market points correct.

But to comprehend the significance of the bombshell disclosure I’m dropping here, it’s crucial that we are on ‘need-to-know-basis’ terms. This means you-need-to-know my family’s great secret, how I came to know what I know and why I want you to know what I know is dangerous to the world if it remains an ‘unknown known’, so to speak.

My family became incredibly wealthy by outsourcing our aversion to poverty to those that worked hard for us. With investments in land, wool, dairy, timber, mining, construction and puddle-proof boots in a country the size of Great Britain and with only the ‘rebel natives’ to foil the British Empire’s imperial plans in the 1860s when my forebears immigrated, you couldn’t go wrong. Like the British aristocracy, we did it through shell companies, Freemasonry and proxy agents with forgettable faces. Today, my families’ Top 40 investments are vital to the Nu Zillun rock-star economy.

The transformations taking place now in the Free-For-All-Insiders global economy have a long genealogy with so many entwined tentacles that they may one day inspire an epic political thriller called The Octopus. Back in the early 1970s, a group called the Council of 13 invited me to help them reassert control of the world. The Council of 13 had their dapperly dressed puppets enthusiastically working on a secret blueprint blandly called the ‘1980s Project’ at an equally insipidly named global policy-shaping think-tank, the Council on Foreign Relations, headquartered in New York. The ‘1980s Project’ prescribed a new alliance between the greedy and powerful Corporate Octopoda Order of America and Europe to include the Baby Octopoda Order of Japan.

Wisely, the plan wasn’t called something like ‘Project Octopus’ because Laurence Shoup and William Minter revealed part of this plan in their book, The Imperial Brain Trust. Because hardly anyone read the ‘serious stuff’ genre even back then when books were only available in 3D, we knew we were safe. The Council of 13’s directive was to address threats to their hidden rule over the plundered, bombed and under-priced planet, as corny and ‘conspiracy theory’ as that sounds.

The threats faced by these Octopus Capitalists from the North Western Atlantic included the pesky peoples’ movements that had emerged in the valve-tube TV days of the 1960s such as the ‘pigment-focused’ Civil Rights, the ‘peacenik’ Anti-War and the ‘girl’s blousy’ Feminist movements. That was how the ‘1980’s Project’ nerds described them in conversations. The ‘whining’ developmental demands of the perpetually Last Place Third World countries, that sought to gain western technology as a ‘fair trade’ for supplying resources ‘gained fair and square through conquest, coercion and corruption’, were also viewed as dangerous. The ‘1980s Project’ sought to hinder the efforts of these ‘disobedients’ through the financial discipline of cunningly re-regulated ‘free markets’.

My contribution was to plan the deployment of ‘free market economic shock treatments’ to the Nu Zillun economy. Coming from a country with a population of ‘sissy conformists’, as our telephone surveys found, I envisaged that the tiny South Pacific Realm of the British Empire would capitulate to corporate raiders straight after an election with pre-scripted scary news of an engineered financial crisis, without mentioning the engineered bit. This scheming started at a time when the United States was ‘losing’ the American War on Vietnam in 1971.

We considered it vital to what is really a Global Neo-Colonial Project that apathy would become widespread worldwide. To this end, we deemed it crucial to depoliticize, downplay and dumb-down important issues. We called it ‘2D Optics’ because we realized that if you can ‘control the optics’, especially by faking sincerity through the media, you’ve got it made. Not only did we invent systemic apathy without announcing it on The News, which is a historical syndicated soap written by dark satirists, we also schemed with news and entertainment moguls to consolidate the media industry into corporate cartels that would mass-produce every distraction imaginable under the soon-to-be-privatized sunlight. That’s the real purpose behind wall-to-wall sports coverage, Same ol’ Same ol’ movies and universally re-versioned reality TV junk content. The Octopus Capitalists wanted citizens recast as ‘consumers’ who wouldn’t care anymore about how the world was being run. So, when those ‘Toto the pesky dog moments’, as we called them, revealed “that man behind the curtain” was faking it as a wizard, people cast as consumers would then take the ‘pay no attention’ cues and carry on shopping in an evilly-directed epic pursuit of hollow happiness.

You read dead right. Our objective was to demoralize people by striping their characters’ of ‘annoying’ free-thinking motivations and ‘pesky’ principled behaviours.

We anticipated there would be pesky journalists such as Naomi Klein who identified our global program of economic warfare as ‘the Shock Doctrine’. Klein showed in her book The Shock Doctrine how the Octopus Bankers have been engineering financial and economic crises in order to coerce governments to take emergency loans from the International Monetary Fund. But hobbled governments could only get these emergency loans to stave off widespread social unrest if they sold off public assets. In private, we called it a Debt for Equity Swap. In public, we called it Austerity.

To mitigate this threat of string-free journalists, we took public relations from a cottage industry to a global phenomenon. In doing so, journalists were lured away from newsrooms with more money, ego-stroking access to the Old Boy’s Network and ‘hoes and blow’. Now, the pesky string-less John Pilgers of this dying world can be out-produced by the Octopuses networks and their puppet PR people. As Klein quite rightly said in The Shock Doctrine documentary, “the Shock Doctrine only works if people don’t know about it”.

So, why you may ask, is an insider whistle-blowing on the Octopuses? To answer that, I need to share some more back-story. I became the black sheep of my family by ‘going wild’ when I fell in love with a feminist while on assignment infiltrating left-wing groups in Nu Zillun after my stint on the ‘1980’s Project’. This assignment was the equivalent of the FBI’s seven COINTELPRO programs to undermine dissent. During my ‘fall from grace’, ironically with a chick called Grace, I came to see that ‘ordinary people’ are amazing. Their magic is best appreciated up close, away from the set-piece social occasions that dominate the lives of the greedy and infamous.

Adding accelerants to my relations’ firey rage, the entire family was excluded from Nu Zillun’s inner clique, codenamed the ‘Great White Flock’, after they discovered that Grace and I had bred a flock of ‘Disobedients’. This precipitated a crisis among the country’s Twenty Ruling Families, and was the real reason why Nu Zillun’s prime minister Robert Muldoon called a snap-election in mid-June 1984 before a school of reef-fish reporters, while drunk. And that’s why you won’t find the entire Edwards family on the wealth porn Rich List. Among an oligarchy, trust is the hemoglobin that binds bloodlines.

It may surprise you when I say that I was actually going to attend the rally in the largest population center, Auckland City. But I got wind that the stocks, commodities and currencies markets were going to go into meltdown mode the following week, from a few old wealthy friends who quietly empathize with my ‘wild worldviews’. So, I had to scramble to reduce my exposure and right-on cue the global equities markets lost $3.3 trillion in value in a week. The meltdown was reminiscent of the liquidation of the Wicked Witch of the West in The Wizard of Oz. It turns out that The Wizard of Oz was an allegory for the American people’s popular struggle to overcome an international banking syndicate that sought to establish a privately-owned central bank through which they could eventually enslave the population with debt.

To make up for not being able to inflict some damage to Nu Zillun’s Twenty Ruling Families on protest day, I used some spare change to rent-a-crowd across the whole economy. Because it was such short notice, my rent-a-crowd’s numbers weren’t a game-changer for the Twenty Ruling Families’ government. If you are like John Key’s Zombie Faithful Voter Crowd you are doubtless well informed and you ‘don’t do protests’ and so you well know that oligarchs by definition are super-rich people who use their enormous economic wealth to steer the political trajectory of whole societies, as Dr. Jeffrey Winters explains in his 3D book, Oligarchy. You therefore have always known and without needing to read it in a school textbook, that the ‘Invisible Hand’ widely promoted in the 1980s to describe the efficient functioning of ‘free markets’ through price signals was just a euphemism for an unseen oligarchy pulling their puppets’ strings.

Had I been at the Auckland protest, I would have informed the misinformed protesters that the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) is more than just the architecture for a huge economic bloc between the United States and 11 other Pacific Rim countries, including Nu Zillun.

In the present era of so-called ‘free markets’, vast anti-competitive transnational corporations operate as cartels, rather like The Hutt Cartel led by Jabba the Hutt, as depicted in the Star Wars space opera. The huge monopolizing corporate combinations – that dominate extraction, production, distribution, financing, marketing and information dissemination – undermine bona fide competition by fixing prices, controlling supply, and reducing diversity through mass production of similar soon-to-be obsolete services and trashed products. I could inform my Rent-a-Crowd protesters through Nu Zillun’s inquisitive press that collusion is to monopolies what sucking blood is to a dynasty of vampires, but only if the Twenty Ruling Families lost their heads.

Because oligarch John Key is Nu Zillun’s Infallible Expert on Everything, he well knew that in my absence, my Rent-a-Crowd protesters were misinformed about the full extent of the stealthy strategy to amputate Democracy’s dying limb. This is partly because as prime minister, he has access to the country’s mass surveillance data through the Five Eyes’ suck-it-all agency, the GCSB (or the Government Communications Security Bureau, for long). Indeed, Key claimed that exactly one-third of the TPP protesters were misinformed! This intelligence access goes some way to explaining Key’s frequent sagely insights. It gives the ex-London and Wall Street banker an edge not unlike the Eye of Sauron in Lord of the Rings, or the Illuminati’s All Seeing Eye symbol on the Federal Reserve cartel’s next-to-worthless one dollar bills if they had radio frequency spy chips embedded in them to track your every move.

If there were a board game to replace Monopoly, called Oligarchy, Key’s modus operandi could be captured in a pick-up card from the ‘Opportunity in Crisis’ stack that may read:

To their credit, the TPP protesters sensed that the Trans-Pacific Partnership is set to consolidate the power of transnational corporations. The unseen Council of 13 plots behind a purple curtain so vast it obscures these dynastic rulers from view. Because amazing people, now cast as consumers, can’t see the purple curtain’s edges, they are unable to even ‘take-a-peek’ behind it, despite glimpsing it everyday and looking the other way like sheep pretending not to notice the farmer’s dog.

The Octopuses of the Octopoda World Order are the biggest sissies you’ll most probably never meet. Worse still, once you comprehend the grand scale of the spectacle overlaid into the make-real world, you can’t help but notice how bad the acting is. And worser, you’ll be torn between sighing and sniggering about how gullible and dumbed-down the Zombie audience is not to notice the bad acting, the B-Grade scripts and the strings attached to creepy scheming tentacles. And worser than worser, you will catch yourself saying, as I have ever since the movie Sixth Sense, when watching The News: “I see puppet people”.